Youth club owner has ties to white supremacists

The promo seems to offer wholesome activities for the young people living around Odessa.

“Good friends, great dancing, awesome music and live bands. We’re the place where young adults can come out and have a good time and be themselves.”

Set to open Friday night, Charles Juba’s new younger-than-21 nightclub is called the Black Flag, which might have been the first signal this might not be the hangout parents would approve of.

The more significant indicator, however, is Juba himself.

He’s a former national director of Aryan Nations and once threatened blacks with a “swinging necktie party” and urged them to “swim back to Africa with a Jew under each arm.”

Word got out over the weekend about Juba’s résumé and his club. Juba could not be reached for comment for this article.

Yesterday, workers hurrying to meet Friday’s opening could be seen inside the doors of the nightclub. It is in a storefront of a mall along Interstate 70 in Odessa, 20 miles east of Kansas City.

Mayor Tom Murry acknowledged he had not known anything about Juba until the town’s police chief filled him in. “We know he’s going to target young people, and now we’re doing everything we can to stop him,” Murry said. “I’ve called the owner of the mall but haven’t heard back yet.”

The website for the club, which invites high school students from Blue Springs, Independence, Fort Osage, Grain Valley and Oak Grove, gives only the barest hint of propaganda. It says the club takes its name from the Civil War guerrilla William Quantrill, who it says rode under the black flag.

“This flag represented the total opposite of what a white flag meant, to surrender,” the website says. “These brave young men refused to surrender to unjust laws being forced upon them (by Federal authorities and military).”

Riding under the “black flag” meant taking no prisoners during the Civil War. Quantrill’s Southern bushwhackers burned Lawrence, Kan., and murdered more than 150 men and boys in 1863.

The site concludes: “So, why surrender to another boring night ... raise The Black Flag and have some fun for a change!”

But Juba’s other electronic messaging sites show he still holds his Aryan views.

According to watchdog group The Southern Poverty Law Center, Juba, who is in his late 30s, began his white supremacy activities in the Ku Klux Klan. In 2005, Juba, then head of Aryan Nations, announced the group would move its headquarters from Pennsylvania to Kansas City, Kan.

A resulting outcry led Juba to quit his post. The group then announced a move to Sebring, Fla.Juba stayed in the Kansas City area and took a supervisory job at a manufacturing plant.